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“Instead of what?”
Her hand. On his chest, resting as lightly as a breeze. Warming him, calming him, letting him know that no matter what he could or couldn’t remember, no matter what was wrong or lost or in danger, she was there with him. Instinctively, he reached up to take hold of it and anchor himself there.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t seem to know much.”
She held on tight. Leaned closer. “It’s okay. It’ll all come back, you’ll see. For now, though, let’s just pretend. We’ll pretend you’re Cameron Ross so you have a name. So you know how to react to people.”
“And who will you pretend to be?” he asked.
There was tension in her fingers, even if her voice was just as soft and soothing. “I never learned to pretend for a living, Mr. Ross. I’m just me.”
He opened his eyes. Considered the face that hovered over him like a soft, bronze moon. The eyes wide, dark and deep. The hair, black as night and tumbled around bare shoulders. The soft, full body tucked into a bright red swimsuit. An impressionist portrait of femininity. A dream of comfort and life. The smile of the sun and the water holding his hand.
“You’re perfectly fine, Lilly,” he assured her, lifting his free hand to her soft face. “Perfectly fine just the way you are.”
Her teeth flashed against her tanned skin. “You did get hit on the head, Mr. Ross. Tell you what. You just close your eyes. I’m going to rummage around and see if I can find some first aid supplies, since they sank mine with my boat. If you don’t do something about those cuts and bruises, you’re going to have some scars you don’t want.”
Her voice sounded breathless, almost upset. He couldn’t place it. But when she pulled away, she did it gently, so she didn’t hurt him. What surprised him more was that it did hurt. Ached, as if he’d been separated from something vital.
“You the oldest in your family, too, Miss Kokoa?” he asked.
She halted. Waited. Smiled again, as if surprised. “As a matter of fact, I am. Terminal caregiver, that’s me. And you don’t need to call me that,” she said. “Especially after what we’ve just been through. Please call me Lilly.”
“I had much the same thought.”
“You want to be called Lilly?”
For the first time since he’d found himself in the raft, he laughed. Really laughed. Even though it hurt like knives, it felt familiar, healing, as if he resorted to it in times of stress. Which, considering the circumstances, was probably appropriate.
“I may be called many things,” he assured her. “I sincerely doubt Lilly is one of them. I guess Cameron will do. Or hey you. Or whosits.”
“Whosits it is,” she agreed. “Now, close your eyes and rest. I’ll be right back.”
“Lilly?”
She stopped. “Yes?”
He tried to make his smile nonchalant. He knew, without seeing her, that she wouldn’t be fooled. “While you’re scrounging up supplies, could you find some aspirin? And maybe some food? I have a feeling that part of my problem is bad nutrition.”
She huffed, as if impatient. “I should have thought of that. Not a lot to eat on a life raft, huh?”
“Why should you have thought about it?” he demanded. “Are you trained for finding strange guys on life rafts?”
He at least got a little chuckle out of her. “Sure. Standard Hawaiian schooling for all the dumb haoles who can’t paddle a canoe. Now, close your eyes for a little while, while I figure this out.”
He did. Even so, he held on to the sound of her, the soft pad of her feet, the throaty hum of her voice as she moved. He didn’t want to let her out of his reach. And not just because she was the only thing he was certain of—because she was something he thought he hadn’t seen much of. She was someone he thought he shouldn’t let loose, like a rare bird sighted in the high branches of a backyard tree.
Lilly. Flower of rebirth. Sweet and tough and bold at once. He liked the image. He liked the woman. He lay with his eyes closed and just drifted on the nearness of her.
He was scaring her. Not just by the fact that he still couldn’t remember, still couldn’t see, but by the fact that he was making her so comfortable around him. So committed and concerned.
She’d been stroking his face. Lilly didn’t do that. Not to anybody but the people she loved. She knew better. The world wasn’t comfortable with touchers. Her Tutu Mary had been a world-class toucher, with hands like miracles, soft and bright and healing. Kahuna’s hands. But Lilly didn’t have kahuna hands. No one did anymore. Lilly just had the instincts bred of a dozen generations of healers, whether she admitted it or not.
For a moment she just stood at the bottom of the bed and stared at him. Just considered what she’d gotten herself into. Lilly Kokoa, librarian extraordinaire, Mike and Wanda Kokoa’s little girl, who knew everybody on the north shore and wanted nothing more in her life than to live near her family and practice a trade that didn’t involve wearing a grass skirt in front of strangers. And suddenly she was stuck in the middle of a movie plot with kidnapers and international movie stars in tuxedos. The Lilly who had left Oahu four days earlier would have laughed at the idea. The Lilly who stood on the carpeted deck of a luxury cruiser, staring down at the compelling features of a man she barely knew, didn’t.
Lilly wasn’t a dreamer. Lilly knew what her life would be. She’d known it from the first moment her mother had said, “Lilly, child, somehow all those beautiful genes of your ancestors mixed up just a little wrong on you.” The reactions of the boys she’d known had borne it out, and the world at large had cemented it. Lilly, whose sister had been a finalist for Miss Hawaii, was plain. She was a young woman with a better brain than a face, and a pragmatism that balanced with age-old instincts that still made people nervous. But Lilly didn’t mind. She didn’t need what she didn’t have and cherished what she did. Which was her family and her interests and her home.
But Lilly wasn’t a savior. She wasn’t an action heroine. She wasn’t a Bond girl.
So what the heck was she doing here trying to save a man who wouldn’t have so much as noticed her if he’d come across her any place else? More important, what was she doing being so afraid for him, as if he meant something to her?
It’s those feet, she said to herself with a wry smile she didn’t feel. I go to do my good deed for the day and find myself obsessing over naked toes.
And hands. And wry, sweet, unfocused eyes the color of deep ocean.
Lilly shook her head as if she were shaking off water and headed for the bathroom to try to scare up some supplies. She should have been laughing at her ridiculous predicament. Instead she was praying.
“You’ve been shot!”
“I was thinking...”
Lilly looked up from the wound she’d just exposed. “Did you listen to me? I said you’ve been shot.”
Positioned with his back against the headboard, his head already circled in a dramatic slash of white gauze, Cameron Ross flashed her an easy grin. “I heard you. Since I’m still alive and my leg seems intact, I imagine it’s all right.”
Lilly wanted to cry. She wanted to run. She was way out of her league here, and it just kept getting worse.
“No, it is not all right,” she insisted. “You can hardly stand up, you have a concussion, and now I find out you’ve been shot. How can that be okay?”
He smiled like a little boy. “I’m alive,” he said. “Considering the alternatives, that’s not bad. Now, are you going to listen?”
Lilly took a second to shut him away beyond closed eyelids. She was tired already, and she’d just been up today. Not out in a life raft for two days. She’d let Cameron sleep for two hours, and he looked more alert than she felt. It wasn’t fair. And that didn’t even take into account the problem at hand, which was the extent of the injuries he’d sustained. Considering how battered and bruised he looked, he should be semi-comatose.
Lilly took another look at the angry gash in his thigh, where the bullet had entered. The salt water hadn’t hurt it, but the time hadn’t helped. Lilly couldn’t think of anything else to do than what she’d already done for his head. Hydrogen peroxide, antibiotic ointment and a dressing. Trying to ignore the fact that her hands were shaking, she set to work.
And did her best to ignore the hard ridges of muscle in that thigh. The flat, washboard abdomen only inches north.
Everything else in between.
Lilly shut her eyes again. This was insane. She was losing her mind, terrified one minute, lusting the next. Or maybe the same. She couldn’t tell anymore. She just knew she should never have told him to strip off that tux. Now he was lounging on the bed in boxers and bandages, and she was in more trouble than ever.
“Lilly?”
Silk boxers. With cartoon figures of Tweety Bird and Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian, who all seemed to be laughing at her.
She refused to open her eyes. “Yes.”
“You’re not getting sick on me, are you?”
If only it were that simple. “No.”
“How soon is the storm coming?”
That did get her to look at him. Lounging back on that bed, lean and male and magnificent, even with those unfocused eyes and all the bruising and abrasions starkly set against too-pale skin. “What?”
He smiled, as if it would help coax the information free. “When was the next storm expected?”
Distracted, Lilly took a look out the window, where the sun was sinking in a red haze to the west. So instinctive was her adjustment to the feel of the increasing swell beneath her that she hadn’t even noticed it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Tonight sometime. Maybe early morning.”
“You mean you can’t read the waves or anything? I thought you said you were Hawaiian.”
She spun on him, ready to snap, only to see the glint of humor in his eyes. Here he was injured, held captive, and he was trying to make her feel better. She could fall in love with a guy like this.
Good thing she knew better.
She managed a none-too-enthusiastic grin. “We Kokoas have the distinction of being the only Hawaiians ever to sink our outrigger.”
“A fine one to be making cracks about us haoles.”
She wanted to giggle. The problem was, if she giggled, she would never stop. Her hands were shaking, and she wanted to vomit. And he was the one with the head injury.
“My Portuguese ancestors, on the other hand, landed on Hawaii during a storm just like this one... well, they didn’t land so much as smash into the shore.”
“Quite a family tree.” His grin was still light and easy, and Lilly wanted to play along. Until his next declaration. “I figure we can use the storm to get free.”
Lilly had been all set to clean his leg. That brought her attention sharply back. “We can what?”
That grin again, brash and fearless, as if he weren’t darn near horizontal from the last try. “Well, it worked before. Why not again?”
“It did not work before,” she retorted. “You’re right back where you started. Only this time you’re working on only one leg and half a brain.”
“Ah, that’s okay,” he assured her. “I have a feeling I’ve never worked on more than half a brain before anyway. What kind of distraction can we provide?”
That brought her to her feet, balled fists on hips. “Don’t do this,” she insisted. “We should wait here. Find out what’s going on. Wait until the ransom is paid, and then we’ll be released.”
She tried very hard to face down his skepticism. It didn’t work.
“Is that how the movie came out?” he asked gently. “The one where I’m kidnaped? Did the kidnapers let the president go after the ransom was paid?”
Lilly stared out the window. “It was just a movie.”
Biting back an oath at the effort it took, Cameron launched himself up to sit, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. “I may not remember much, Lilly,” he told her, his eyes empty of that mad sparkle, “but I think I remember that if a kidnaper is going to let his victims go, he generally tries really hard not to let them see his face.”
Well, that made her feel better. “I know.”
“Then you know we have to get out of here.”
That brought her head up. “How?”
He looked around as if he could actually focus. “I don’t know. Let’s check out the room and see if we find anything. Who knows? Maybe the ship’s computer system goes through here and I can reprogram it.”
“This isn’t a movie, Cameron.”
He smiled. “But I do know computers,” he said. “Find me one, and maybe I can do some damage.”
“You sit down,” she said. “I’ll look.”
He shook his head and got unsteadily to his feet. “No. We’ll both look.”
Lilly took a look as every inch of his more than six feet uncoiled before her and found herself struggling for breath. “Well, would you at least put some clothes on first?” she demanded. “It’s really hard to be serious about this when the only thing you’re wearing is Daffy Duck.”
She saw the real confusion in Cameron’s eyes when she said that. He looked down, as if trying to remember what he would find. “I could probably use a good mouthwash and a shave, too, couldn’t I?” he admitted ruefully.
Lilly almost laughed. His head couldn’t be so banged up that he didn’t realize how stop-traffic-on-a-six-lanehighway-gorgeous he was. Pecs and a six-pack, her sister would have said. The Impossible Dream, was how Lilly saw it. And topped off with a face that only seemed more roguish with that stubble of beard he was affecting. Gentle and wise and rare.
And she wasn’t even going to consider his feet.
So she turned around and began searching the cabin.
The room would have been huge even if they’d been on land. It was also clean. No, not clean. Almost sterile. Devoid of little musses and dropped objects that signified real occupation. Empty of personal photos or comfortable clutter.
“Don’t you know anybody well enough to hang their picture?” she asked.
There was a pause. “I don’t know.”
Lilly flinched. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Well, we won’t get any hints about the real Cameron Ross in this room. I don’t think he lives here.”
She got another pause, this one longer. Lilly turned to see Cameron standing in the bathroom, balancing himself with his hands against the sink, his consideration on the man in the mirror.
“Familiar?” she couldn’t help but ask.
He didn’t answer right away. Just kept staring. “I don’t ever think it occurs to anyone that he won’t recognize the face he sees in the mirror.”
Lilly didn’t even realize she was moving until she stood next to him in the bathroom door. “You mean it?”
She should have sounded less afraid. She shouldn’t have reached out to touch him. But when he turned, she was right there, her hand on his arm. And he smiled. A smile that only hinted at the turmoil that must have been going on behind those sky-blue eyes.
“Kind of silly to be this afraid of somebody I’m supposed to know pretty well.”
Lilly was a toucher, just like her tutu had been, and hers before her. So her natural instinct was to touch. To offer comfort. Without a qualm, she just rose on her toes and wrapped her arms around him.
And he held her, too, curling around her as if she were his last hold on sanity. As if he were reassuring himself with her reality to bolster his own.
“It’s going to be okay,” she insisted in a whisper, her cheek against his chest. “I promise.”
His instinctive laugh was a rumble against her ear. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, young lady.”
Lilly pulled her head back and smiled for him. “But I can keep them,” she said. “My ancestors were kahunas. The keepers of the secrets, who knew magic and medicine the likes of which we’ll never know again. They knew things the world has lost, and in my dreams they share them with me. I know what’s going to happen, and I know what isn’t. And I know you’re going to be okay.”
